Mark Bauerlein’s Brainstorm post on the demise of tenure is burning up the Web; his warning that higher education is about to start winnowing out tenure in weaker programs is absolutely spot on in its truth, I’m afraid. Teaching-intensive institutions will face this reality very quickly over the coming decade.
Not long ago, however, I wrote a column about how faculty would be wise to pursue “portable” tenure, the tenure within one’s profession that makes one marketable throughout a lifetime. As with many things in our age, we won’t be able to place our faith in institutions for our care and success; the burden is going to be placed squarely on our shoulders. This will be difficult, but some kind of equilibrium will develop in the future. Full-time jobs with benefits will be more competitive, which will be brutal in many ways, but I am concerned not only with the realities of the marketplace but also with an important benefit tenure offers: the increased aegis of academic freedom. The pressures on the professoriate, from both on-campus and off-campus courses, will be immense as tenure declines. These are serious times indeed. Do you think that Bauerlein’s warning is accurate?
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3 Responses to The Connection Between Tenure and Academic Freedom
saranuryildiz - August 17, 2009 at 4:10 pm
absolutely
vfichera - August 17, 2009 at 8:14 pm
If only the link to the earlier column were functioning so that we could read it — but I digress.Taking as a point of departure the idea of a form of “portable” tenure, I am prompted to compare academia to the medical profession (again). If “tenure” were replaced by a form of state “licensure,” well, that might be interesting for many reasons. For one, it would be a form of “checks and balances” system on the variation in the “value” of advanced degrees from various levels of institutions. Further, there could be the equivalent of “board certifications” (at the institutional level these are often referred to as “post-tenure” reviews, are they not?) and there would be “continuing professional education” required as well, along the lines of CME and its credit system for doctors. Of course, unlike academia, the medical profession has serious peer review, of course, when it chooses to enforce it. But at least there are vestiges of the guild mentality in that medical doctors rarely “bad-mouth” each other outside of the guild and defend, protect, and compensate quite well, their physician assistants, for example (six figures is the norm in many regions of the country). The problem of academic freedom would remain, however, with “portable” tenure/licensure because the “solo practioner” in academia does not have the independence of a free-standing practice. Thus, “portable” tenure would only be a means of better stratifying the adjunctification of the university.But do the current tenured actually care? “Apres moi, le deluge,” n’est-ce pas? After all, even the president of the AAUP is a retired full professor who double-dips and double-games the system by collecting a pension and an adjunct salary at the same time. Never mind the fact that when tenured faculty play that game they are under-cutting the entire tenure system, choosing self-serving ends over professional guild allegiance.So, indeed, we are likely facing the twilight years of tenure — where the words of T. S. Eliot ring “hollowly” in our ears: “This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.”
lindarawles - August 20, 2009 at 11:49 am
Wouldn’t it be helpful – even crucial – to define these terms, especially “academic freedom”?